Crappy film

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

I decided to acquire this (albeit from other sources rather than the legitimate Image DVD) following Michael Elliott's solid *** review of some time ago. Surprisingly enough, I found this modest genre outing to be quite engaging and enjoyable most of the way and certainly undeserving of the dubious honor of being currently positioned at #95 on the IMDb's "Bottom 100" list! John Carradine gives his usual commitment to the standard 'mad doctor' role; the hero Myron Healey is quite sympathetic and the film's three female leads (Allison Hayes, Marilyn Buferd and Sally Todd) very attractive. On the debit side are Tor Johnson's amusing blazer-tie-sandals attire and moronic speech ("Time for go to bed" he blurts out to the guests at one point) as Lobo, Carradine's all-purpose assistant (valet-cook-bodyguard- guinea pig) and the incessant histrionics of the other male inmate (Arthur Batanides) – although the insults the latter hurls at the former during breakfast are fairly hilarious! Despite the misleadingly other-worldly title, the villains and crimes perpetrated here are decidedly mundane (especially given the clumsy and panic-stricken antics of Carradine's elderly partner Roy Gordon). It is all well and good that the would-be escaped convict hero is revealed to have been an undercover cop all along but it seems improbable that he would discover Carradine's underground lair of Dr. Moreau-esquire failures (including a creepy pre-CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962) wraith-like creature) so easily and it would have been much more convincing if, say, Gordon had inadvertently mentioned it to Hayes or, better still, left them unlocked for some reason. Equally silly is the fact that Carradine reveals the full extent of his experiments to Healey from the get-go and then allows him to roam freely among the potential (and, as I said, good-looking) victims themselves!! Besides, how anyone can mistake a Southern mansion in the middle of a swamp for a health spa is beyond me. In any case, despite the above-mentioned absurdities, the film contrives to end with a bang as we get a good look at the results of Carradine's previous guinea pigs.

This movie created a live MST3K moment during it's World Premiere run.The World Priemere was at the Roosevelt theater in Chicago. The top billed film was "Beginning of the End" (Yes, the one about the giant grasshoppers invading Chicago.) That this film got second billing should tell you something about this flick.If you've not read other reviews, John Carradine has created a synthetic gland that he thinks will give eternal youth. About halfway through the picture, he implants his eternal youth gland (Which looks suspiciously like a pulsating jalapeño pepper.) into Sally Todd and moves her to his moldy basement to recover.When they check on her later, instead of remaining eternally young, she's all wrinkled and shriveled up and looks about a hundred years old.At this point, someone waaaaay at the back of the balcony yelled out, "YA GOT IT IN UPSIDE DOWN!!!" It must have been at least five minutes before the laughter subsided and you could hear the movie again.

John Carradine is one of those actors from a bygone era that seemed to look at acting as an actual job rather than something to do every now and then while living in multiple homes and living life of luxury. No, he seemed to go from one movie to another taking parts in really good films and really, really bad films. That being said, he has been in more than a couple of films that were featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000 and this was one of them. Not an entirely bad film, Red Zone Cuba was a much worse film that was featured on the show, this film is a bit slow paced even for a film that has a run time of just over an hour. Basically, just your typical mad scientist film that features a mad scientist, strange monsters and Tor Johnson as a sidekick named Lobo! Yes, Tor appeared as a sidekick named Lobo in like two other films other than this one, but while those two Lobo's were the same character, this one is a totally different Lobo...the distinction is apparently this one speaks. So, it has its moments and the film is upgraded a bit by John Carridine's performance, but overall, just seems like it needed a bit more going on.The story has a mansion that seems to be in the middle of nowhere, but near the end of the film seems to be right in the middle of the city housing special patients who seem to think they are there for some sort of mental health treatment. Unfortunately for them, the good doctor who resides in the house plans on using them for his experiments to prolong man's life to an eternity using a special gland that he apparently created or something. A man caught outside the mansion and who the doctor believes is an murder on the run ends up being recruited to be a part of the experiments, but this man seems to know something is not right and tries to uncover the truth.This made for a pretty good episode of MST3K as most films featuring Tor Johnson do. This film had not one, but two shorts which is a bit puzzling seeing as how the film ran 72 minutes which might merit the inclusion of one short, but not really two. Makes me wonder what they edited out of this one. A lot of the riffs in this one were geared to Tor Johnson's Lobo character and John Carridine's mansion that is just about the only place you see during the duration of this film.So, not a horrible film, but just kind of slow. I would not really want to see the film in its entirety as I cannot imagine it really adding anything to this film. What I did see seemed pretty cut and dry as it was a mad scientist using people as guinea pigs for his crazy experiments. You get to see people misshaped by his experiments and I like how they treat the one girl as if she is dead. It's like, "Oh my, she is now unattractive, let's just leave her here to rot because her life is now over." So if you want to see a film featuring strange experiments, a mad doctor and Tor as Lobo this film fits the bill! Along with like at least two other films...

Although made in 1957, THE UNEARTHLY is one of those throwbacks to the kinds of cheap horror pictures cranked out by minor studios in the 1940's that often starred Bela Lugosi, or George Zucco, or as in this film, John Carradine as a mad scientist. This film, with John Carradine as a mad scientist trying to create immortal beings must of seemed old and shopworn to 1957 audiences. The film is talky and plodding. Scenes are dull. The last ten minutes the film picks up speed and we get a chance to see the botched results of Carradines experiments and some fine make up work by Harry Thomas. Its the only thing from preventing me from calling this a total disaster. Oh! I almost forgot, Allison Hayes is sexy.